This paper presents a qualitative analysis of interviews (31 hours of audio recordings) with speakers of Australian and British English that were shown several video extracts. It concentrates on the interviewees’ evaluations of the video participants’ perception of attempts at humour, particularly when a negative reaction is produced by the target/the third-party. Drawing primarily on the work on identity in interactional sociolinguistics (e.g. Bucholtz & Hall 2005) and identity construction in narratives (Holmes 1997; Bucholtz 1999; De Fina 2007), the paper explores identities with which the interviewees signal their affiliation/disaffiliation, examines possible reasons for those identities to be considered desirable/undesirable in interpersonal contexts and why, in both cases, they appear to be resisted by the interview participants.
In the preliminary analysis, it can be observed that in their narratives many interviewees indicate the appreciation of the interlocutors’ construction of ‘humorous’ identities in interaction that can be linked to an expectation among speakers of English to project an affiliative reaction to humour (Haugh 2014; Sinkeviciute 2017). Thus, it is not surprising that the negative reaction to humour seems to be treated as an undesirable identity that the interviewees tend to resist. However, some variability has also been noticed, precisely, that the negative reaction can also be indexed as an aspect of a desirable identity. Nevertheless, this desirable ‘offended’ identity happens to be ultimately resisted as the non-preferred one in favour of the ‘humorous’ identity to be projected in interaction.
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